There isn’t a lot I can say about this book that hasn’t already been said. I saw (did not meet) Joe Haldeman at the Nebula’s last year, but this book has been recommended to me so many times for so many years. I finally decided to give it a shot. It’s a war novel, and due to time dilation with relativistic travel, while only a few years pass in the experience of the protagonist, hundreds of years pass back on Earth.
The allegory of this book to the Vietnam war is clear. Grunts don’t know why they’re fighting, and the world they return to is not the same world they left. And the fighting is all for nothing. The message was a good one for our current timeline; maybe we should all read more books instead of banning them?
In some ways, the book was entirely predictable. I read “Starship Troopers” by Heinlein decades ago, and there are similarities to Scalzi’s “Old Man’s War” as well. Maybe the book was so predictable because it’s been around so long and there have been numerous books in the same style. But it didn’t detract from the reading. It was a light, easy style, even when describing death and carnage. Fast paced. I felt like I was there. And the (spoiler) happy ending was signaled halfway through, so it wasn’t a surprise, but also, I”m glad it ended the way it did.
The forward to the edition I read was by Scalzi, and there are some interesting tidbits in there about how he got to meet Haldeman, and how he had not read this book before writing his own.
I have to be more stingy with my 5-star ratings, so I’m giving this one 4-stars. I think mostly because of the time it was written, and how writing styles have changed. For example, the book addresses hetero- and homosexuality, though in a way that wouldn’t probably work today. Hard to use that as evidence against the book, though. The characters are interesting, but don’t do a lot of growth; the book, to me, focuses on plot and the implications of the plot.